The pace of change and improvement in the realms of power generation, aviation, and other fields has accompanied extensive research for manufacturing components used in these fields. Conventional manufacture of metallic components generally includes milling or cutting away regions from a slab of metal before treating and modifying the cut metal to yield a part, which may have been simulated using computer models and computer aided design. Manufactured components which may be formed from metal include airfoil components for installation in a turbomachine such as an aircraft engine or power generation system, as well as mechanical components for other manufacturing, transportation, and structural systems.
The development of additive manufacturing, also known in the art as “3D printing,” can reduce manufacturing costs by allowing such components to be formed more quickly, with unit-to-unit variations as appropriate. Additive manufacturing also increases the ability to manufacture complex shapes that may have been difficult to achieve through casting, subtractive, or other conventional manufacturing methods. Among other advantages, additive manufacture can directly apply computer-generated models to a manufacturing process while relying on a common additive manufacturing platform across products, components, and variations and customizations thereof.
One of the design characteristics and limitations of airfoil blades in a turbomachine may be the blades' cooling ability. Individual blade designs may take cooling features into consideration depending on the stage, size, operating range, duty cycle, and other characteristics of the blade location, turbomachine system, and other operating conditions. Cooling features may include blade shape, surface features, cooling channels, internal chambers, impingement jets, and other features for directing cooling fluids in a heat transfer relationship with some portion of the blade. For example, some blade designs include a hollow interior and accommodate one or more inserts for dividing the hollow interior into separate cooling chambers. Some inserts may define a cooling space between an outer wall of the insert and the interior surface of the blade body. The insert may receive the cooling fluid (cooler air) in an interior space in the insert and include impingement jets for distributing the cooling fluid into the cooling space.